Productive Alliance and Partnership in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Pain
The US Demand division of the largest pharmaceutical company provides support for a large mobile sales force. To make that force most effective, they provide a customer relationship management tool based on Siebel technology. This tool had to integrate with many backend systems. In fact, over 100 interfaces needed to be created very rapidly. The US Demand division had some experience with Informatica as an integration platform but realized this would not be the right mechanism for these realtime integrations. Because the CRM platform was from Oracle, the US Demand team assumed that Oracle ESB would be the best choice.

Vision
An Application Platform Specialist with Microsoft worked with the largest pharmaceutical company’s integration team to describe how BizTalk Server was a much better fit for the situation. He proposed that a solution built on Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 would provide quicker development time and use a product their enterprise integration team already supported.

Value
The Connected Business System teams from MPS Partners quickly worked with Microsoft to frame up a proof of concept to meet the following US Demand requirements:

1. Determine the most cost-effective platform for a large integration project that could be developed rapidly and would interface with the pharmaceutical company’s existing Oracle platform.
2. Identify a platform that would accomplish the following capabilities:
   - Process flat file and send to Siebel via Webservice
   - Read contacts from Oracle and create a standard format file for Siebel
   - Read accounts from Oracle, de-batch to single files and send to Siebel via Siebel Adapter
3. Pinpoint a platform that would include robust governance – showing how the platform can be operationally monitored; and robust management – quickly being able to configure and deploy new interfaces.

Solution
After a challenging and condensed Proof of Concept period where we went to great lengths to successfully and smoothly overcome unforeseen issues within the company’s server. One of the largest pharmaceutical companies chose Microsoft BizTalk as the most cost-efficient and effective platform to meet the needs of their current large integration project, as well as future anticipated projects. Ultimately, the BizTalk Server’s fit within Eli Lilly’s Microsoft-oriented platform, its rapid development time, its robust feature set, ease of management and our knowledge of Microsoft solutions set BizTalk apart from Oracle ESB.

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